The United States celebrates Independence Day this week. It's a celebration of the Declaration of Independence signed in 1776, when the states decided that they should no longer be colonies and cast off English rule.
When we celebrate this holiday, the theme is usually around the liberties traditionally associated with life in the United States of America. The creation of the United States republic in the years that followed independence was based on English traditions, but formalized with a Constitution that recognized rights granted by Natural Law. The US Constitution has influenced worldwide liberty in a positive manner since then. Though the US government's influence on liberty at home and abroad in the past few decades has not been so positive.
Independence in action and thought is a prerequisite to liberty. When in a state of liberty, people may choose to behave in a dependent manner. However, when interactions are required and no longer by choice, liberty can no longer be claimed. This is why the classic American independence ethic is found not only at the country level, but at the individual level.
Liberty in the United States and abroad is under attack by those who wish to exert power over every aspect of our lives. In the times of the American Revolution, no government ever dreamed of the type of power and influence it could yield when every communication, financial transaction, and piece of information a user created or accessed could be so easily tracked and stored. Recent developments in artificial intelligence allow very sophisticated data mining. Such systems can very easily identify your opinions, preferences, political leanings, gender, habits, likely behaviors, and much much more. Even when information has been "anonymized," such systems can easily de-anonymize data, determining information about specific individuals. With these powers, dissident voices can easily be identified, targeted, and silenced.
Free speech is certainly under attack by mainstream news and social media outlets. Based on recent purges on YouTube and other platforms, one doesn't have to be a hard-core radical, racist, or an advocate for violence to get the boot. One can argue that these platforms have every right to censor the content that they carry, but that assertion misses the fact that they have been given special legal dispensation as "platforms" that simply show content that others have provided. Publishers, however, are entities who actively curate content and carry responsibility for it. These platforms are behaving more and more like publishers than platforms. For this article, however, we are more concerned about government actors than private organizations, though we may wonder how intertwined those classes of actors are becoming.
This article is primarily about our favorite topic at Ethical Developer Group: PRIVACY. Many will question what privacy has to do with independence or liberty. It may be take a few steps to show the linkage, but we've stumbled across a source that has done that very well.
I'm less of a YouTube fan than ever, but they are still a platform carrying some of the video content I follow. For privacy's sake I typically access YouTube content using SkyTube, a GPL 3.0 free and open-source piece of software (FOSS) downloaded from F-Droid onto my privacy-oriented phone running LineageOS instead of Android. This allows me to have a phone with most Android functions available to me, but without any of Google's invasive apps or services installed.
One of my favorite channels is Naomi Brockwell's. She's a very cool, tech-savvy libertarian who tracks events in the cryptocurrency world. I often watch her Weekly Crypto Recap while making breakfast for my family on Saturday mornings. This weekend she uploaded a video from the Bitcoin 2019 conference where she introduced Edward Snowden who joined remotely to talk about Bitcoin and Privacy. I highly recommend taking the time to watch this video.
Edward Snowden made a number of excellent points on the connection between privacy and liberty that I would like to share here.
"It doesn't matter if you have nothing to hide, because privacy isn't about something to hide. Privacy's about something to protect!" I have to say I'm impressed with the sheer simplicity and truth in his statement. Many who I engage on the topic of privacy make the statement that they have nothing to hide, and I'm always stuck looking for the words that will help them get why privacy is so important. Snowden hit the nail on the head with this statement, and then went on to observe that privacy is a fundamental part of a free and open society. It allows people to have transactions and take actions that don't necessarily conform with majority norms. Without going outside of societal norms, there is never any innovation or growth in society.
"Privacy is that thing that says you belong to you, rather than to society." Note the importance of this concept to liberty. An individual shouldn't have all of their opinions exposed, or they will face the scrutiny of those who would like to be the thought police in our current environment. As mentioned above, without privacy some new ideas will be destroyed long before they have a chance to develop into something useful.
With my personal Catholic theology, I'm forced to argue that we don't really belong to ourselves, but the concept of free will shows that God doesn't try to control our actions directly. He would certainly have more right to do so than any human being or society would, and His example is one that should be followed, provided that we aren't hurting anybody or taking their stuff.
"Rights exist to protect the minority against the majority, and there is no more vulnerable minority than the minority of one." He's absolutely right. It's the expression of unpopular opinions that requires protection. Not only is that the purpose of the US Constitution's 1st Amendment, it is also a very basic libertarian concept as described by Tom Woods and other libertarian scholars whom I respect. I would be very surprised if Snowden isn't digging into anarcho-capitalist literature, based on the opinions he shared in this session.
One more important thing Snowden said was that individuals' willingness to sacrifice privacy denies it to others. Because so many people are willing to give it up for short-term convenience and comfort, they expose the outline of those who would prefer to keep their data private. They are likely to share the very information that their friends would avoid exposing (imagine, for instance, when they keep their friends' contact information on Google Contacts and use Gmail to communicate with them, knowing that Google's entire business is about collecting data). Even when they don't directly expose other users' information, they can expose connections and highlight a sort of negative space that allows the details to be easily calculated or filled-in.
Snowden stated that "Lack of privacy is an existential threat to Bitcoin and it's an existential threat to the cryptocurrency space broadly." Much like what happens when people give up privacy in other domains, he observed that using cryptocurrencies on an open ledger or whose actions are transparent by default (where mixing and other privacy actions would have to be manually selected and executed by the user), allows for those who aren't concerned about privacy to expose those who are.
What he didn't quite explicitly state, though he talked his way around it, was that non-private cryptocurrency transactions threaten the fungibility of cryptos. When you use cash, you don't know if those dollars were used at some point for drug deals, prostitution, money-laundering, or other objectionable acts. Fact is, you don't WANT to know, because then somebody might decide that the specific dollars you are holding aren't worth as much because of their provenance, meaning their history or pedigree. Cryptocurrency transactions on an open ledger could easily be traced back to the addresses of bad actors and/or undesirable transactions. So some crypto coins or tokens might be labeled as undesirable dirty money, possessing decreased or even zero value. By definition, this makes the cryptos non-fungible. Further, if this happens, then all Bitcoin and open-ledger cryptos can suddenly become less desirable.
Edward Snowden put his life on the line to expose the federal government's habit of using classification to hide misbehaviors that are unlawful and unconstitutional. By law, classification can only be used to protect information in specific categories and that list does not include information that would be embarrassing to the federal government or would result in government employees being imprisoned or tried for treason against the people of the United States. Such a concept is anathema to a free society. To this date, he is still hunted by the US federal government, which would like to drag him in front of a kangaroo court to try him for the hideous crime of exposing their misbehaviors.
Regardless of his heroism, I still reserve the right to disagree with some of his statements. I'm concerned about what he said about democracy. Primarily, I disagree with his assertions that governments' misbehaviors should or can be kept in check via democratic processes.
Earlier I shared his excellent quote that "rights exist to protect the minority, and there is no more vulnerable minority than the minority of one." Note that no democracy protects those who hold minority views. That is simply counter to the concept of democracy and the reason that the framers of the US Constitution chose not to create a democracy! The larger population can choose to render unpopular, unconventional views illegal, while incarcerating those who hold them. This is exactly why the founders of the United States set up a constitutional republic where certain actions were off-limits to the government, no matter how popular they might be. When a properly-written constitution is obeyed, then minorities of all sorts can be protected.
I will observe that the United States government does not follow the US Constitution. The constitutional republic has been dead for much of my life. However, I will still reiterate that democratic institutions will do absolutely nothing to protect the fundamental right to hold an unpopular opinion. Especially if that opinion is counter to the elected, would-be thought controllers' views.
I think that Snowden's comments showed the important linkages between privacy and liberty. Additionally, I believe he exposed exactly why cryptocurrencies are so important to the future of privacy and liberty (check out the video, as I didn't go into that much here). Being free to communicate and to transact financially without exposure or requiring permission to do so are the very definition of liberty.
If you want to retain your personal independence and liberty, today you have to take conscious action to escape the digital panopticon. By default, you simply won't be independent or free for very long.
Here at Ethical Developer Group we are concerned about privacy precisely because of the linkages with liberty. We will not have a free world if people do not take privacy seriously and/or privacy is not allowed. Please join us in learning about threats, finding alternative paths, and making our way out of the Digital Panopticon. Sign up for our email updates, become a user of the site, and show your support of our mission on social media sites including LinkedIn, Twitter, Gab, and Steam.
